My thoughts on From Paris With Love

The fact that I want to see Sean Connery as James Bond every time I think of this film is perhaps the most exciting thing about this movie.  While pairing Jonathan Rhys Meyers with John Travolta is a strange move to say the least, it is not entirely awful.  What is awful, however, is the story.

The main premise of the film is that Rhys Meyers, as assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France James Reece, wants to break into work for the CIA's black ops.  He responds to some mysteriously unknown man who calls his cell at odd moments, and mostly does work purchasing guns and switching license plates.  He finally gets called up when the agency is short a man for a Paris operation. 

Rhys Meyers plays the straight-and-narrow to Travolta's unorthodox Charlie Wax.  The initial official line is that the unlikely duo are driving around Paris to take out some notorious drug traffickers because their product killed the daughter of the Secretary of Defense.  This soon devolves into some Pakistani plot to assasinate the U.S. mission to an African Summit being held in France.  It just so happens, of course, that the would-be suicide bomber turns out to be the woman Reece just enfianced.   Clearly.

While Travolta is given a wonderful character to play, with a lot of well-written lines and ultra bad-ass action sequences, Rhys Meyers is playing against type and, unfortunately, his own good looks.  He just doesn't fit the straight-and-narrow, wanna-be spook character and his performance comes across as wooden.

There are also a number of issues with the script in general.  Coming from a background in diplomatic protection, the fact that the leader of the protection detail for the U.S. mission not only asks the members of the mission to weigh in on security decisions, but doesn't request details on the threat to his protectees, I find the whole scenario to be ridiculous.  It makes security professionals look stupid and portrays a situation that never happens in real life.  If there is a valid threat on a protectee's life, security professionals do not ask their protectee's advice - they alter course and get the protectee to safety.  There are no if's, and's, or but's.

There also would have been so much security on the mission's route, insomuch that no one would have been able to start driving against the flow of traffic on a path to crash into the motorcade.  And Charlie Wax would never have been able to use a grenade launcher from an overpass looking over the motorcade's route.

Moreover, if Reece was actually able to convince the U.S. Ambassador that there was a suicide bomber at the Africa Summit, no one, and I mean NO ONE, would have allowed Reece to enter with his stupid little handgun to go handle the situation or "talk it out."  The proper security professionals would have tracked the woman down and her head would have been riddled with at least 10 bullets from 10 different guns.  We wouldn't have had to sit through the last ten minutes of practically nonsensical monologue from Rhys Meyers about the all-importance of love because his fiance would have been dead at least 15 minutes prior.

Of course, my man friend Morgan also pointed out that if the movie had followed any sort of logic, the security threat would have been neutralized about halfway through the movie and you wouldn't have had all the bang-up action in the meantime.  You wouldn't get to see Travolta play with a grenade launcher or any of the fun car chase scenes.

My final word: To watch this movie you really have to suspend your disbelief.  In fact, you may want to anesthetize it.  That means at least a six-pack or a few rounds of shots.  Some of the action sequences are fun, as is the character of Charlie Wax, but I really wish that the screenwriters put a bit more thought into making it more realistic.  I prefer being wowed by both the action AND the story in my action movies.